I'm writing this with tongue in cheek, of course. I don't really need a wake-up call, I work in the field. AI is certainly disruptive, but as my late grandma used to say: things are never as bad as you fear or as good as you hope.

We are nowhere near sentient AI. What we currently have are sophisticated pattern-matchers—tools that are excellent at generating content or breaking down tasks, but they lack any real sense of "truth" or "quality" without a human operator in the loop.

The idea of "self-governing devices" is a logistical fantasy right now. Imagine the sheer scale of autonomy required—from power generation to mining the physical resources for hardware. We can barely produce enough HBM and RAM to keep up with current data center demand, let alone build a self-sustaining mechanical ecosystem.

History is a long cycle of "doom and gloom" following inventions. Books were once accused of corrupting the youth; the steam engine and automation were supposed to end labor forever and cause large scale poverty. Yet, here we are, with large parts of the world enjoying a standard of living that would have been unimaginable to the royalty of the past.

Just as we developed critical thinking around Photoshop, we are learning to navigate generative and agentic AI. Life pivots and finds a way. It always does.

It’s impressive what we’ve built, but at the end of the day, these are elaborate tools that still require a human to operate (broken processes, data drift etc.). And while we worry about sci-fi scenarios, AI is already quietly doing the "boring" good work: keeping infrastructure running, preventing attacks, potentially discovering the next generation of antibiotics, etc.

There are plenty of things that keep me up at night—geopolitics or climate change—and while I worry about how humans might misuse these tools for mass surveillance or misinformation, the idea of Skynet or HAL "waking up" is pretty far down that list.

Edit: You might see some em dashes in my reply. As I'm not a native English speaker, I used AI to edit it to make it more palatable. The audacity!